by
Bryant FrazerIvan's Childhood
opens, unexpectedly enough, inside a dream. The film
is impatient. Its dreaming actually begins before the Mosfilm logo has
faded from
the screen, as the call of a cuckoo echoes softly on the soundtrack.
Young Ivan
appears, surrounded by trees (their pine needles dripping with what
must be
cool morning dew), our view of his face criss-crossed by the
lines of a
spider's web strung up between the branches. The shot is perfectly
composed,
with the tree's slender trunk and one of its branches creating a
secondary,
off-centre frame around the boy's face. Ivan pauses there for only a
moment--he
must be looking for the cuckoo--before turning abruptly out of frame, a
move
that sends the camera skyward, moving vertically up the body of the
pine and
revealing more of the landscape. When the camera finishes its ascent,
Ivan is
again visible, in the midground of the image. His scrawny body, now
seen in
apparent miniature, turns again towards the camera. Nature is large and
beautiful; he is small and, while lovely in a way, still awkward in his
skin.

Director Andrei Tarkovsky was known for his camera's affinity with
nature, and the misty imagery
here seems
to indicate a remembrance of humid childhood summers. (Tarkovsky
himself
wrote that
the sequence was inspired by his own memories from the age of 4.) In
the first,
startling edit of the film, we see that Ivan is being watched by a
goat, who
peers back into the camera lens in extreme close-up. Running between the trees,
Ivan catches sight of a butterfly. And then something remarkable
happens: laughing, Ivan begins to move into the trees overhead as the
camera
tracks alongside him. A magical POV shot swooping down towards the
riverbank
below precisely evokes those delightful dreams--I had them when I was
Ivan's
age--in which you find yourself flying through the air, inexplicably
and
effortlessly. Still, the orchestral music by Vyacheslav Ovchinnikov
isn't full
of triumph and wonder. It's mysterious and in a minor key, recalling
Bernard
Herrmann's woozy Vertigo score. Incongruously,
the camera next moves
slowly sideways alongside a wall of dirt--the cuckoo bird again
audible--until it locates Ivan's face in profile. Shafts of sunlight
filter through
the trees. Ivan shields his face from the sun, then turns to find a
woman with
a bucket of water walking nearby. He runs to her, and the music swells
on the
soundtrack, happier now but still undergirded by the two-tone
dissonance of
that cuckoo bird overhead. Ivan dunks his face in the water, then looks
up at the woman and says, "Mama, there's a cuckoo."

The mother beams down at him and wipes her brow,
and suddenly Ivan's Childhood makes a wrenching
descent into hell.
Without warning, the camera snaps forward, lurching into Mama's face at
a Dutch
angle, and Ovchinnikov's score is overpowered by an anguished cry and a
terrible, unexpected ripping sound. In the next shot, Ivan jerks
himself awake
in a dark room as the noises of giant pieces of wood creaking can be
heard in
the background. Ivan's face, seen from an extreme low angle, is no
longer
gentle and full of curiosity, but rather wide-eyed and terrified. As he
makes
his way down a staircase, the camera tilts down, assuming an
unnaturally high
vantage as Ivan peers out through a hole in the wall. The next cut is
to
another sharply-canted low-angle of Ivan leaving the building,
which is
revealed to be a disused windmill. Ivan makes his way towards the
rising
sun a a field littered with bodies. It used to be a farm. Ivan
crosses a
flooded plain studded with trees and thick with reeds as flares drop
from the
sky. Criss-crossed lines of barbed wire stretch across the screen in
parody of
the delicate spiderweb from Ivan's dream. It's a crypt-quiet but dreadful tableau, and, woodwinds hooting softly on the soundtrack, it frames the
opening
titles of this initially playful but mournful and ultimately ghastly
film.

Ivan's Childhood is a World War II drama
told mainly from the
perspective of the Soviets fighting along the Dnieper River, pushing
the
invading German forces west. (The original story by Vladimir Bogomolov
is set
near Minsk, in Belarus, though the picture was shot mostly
outside of
Kiev,
Ukraine.) Although Tarkovsky had already gained attention with his
46-minute
student film The Steamroller and the Violin,
completed at
Mosfilm in 1960, Ivan's Childhood really made his
reputation.
Tarkovsky's mise-en-scène uses careful blocking
of the actors to
emphasize the emotion of a moment, or the unspoken quality of a
conversation.
His camera frame slices out chunks of three-dimensional space, with
characters
stepping out of the foreground only to reconfigure the image
by
strolling, seconds later, into the background. The cinematography, by
Vadim
Yusov, isn't noir-ish, exactly, but it often
recalls the unsettling
visuals favoured by German expressionism, dark shadows stretching
across the
scene, and beams of light stabbing into the darkness. That's the
tragedy--Ivan's recurring dreams of the unspoiled, natural world are
merely a
hazy fantasy, while the stark black-and-white nightmare of soldiers,
trenches,
and death camps is his reality.

What's most surprising, given Tarkovsky's
generally uncompromising approach to cinema, might be how
conventionally Ivan's
Childhood plays as entertainment. The Soviet soldiers who discover Ivan
crouching in the river in the opening scenes don't know what to
make of
him. (Amusingly, he identifies himself only as "Bondarev" and demands
to speak to their commander.) He comes on like a delusional gamin aloft
on a "Calvin
& Hobbes" flight of fancy, but his bona fides as a
member of the
resistance are verified soon enough. It sets him up as a terrific
war-movie
character: the pipsqueak spy sent on recon missions behind enemy lines.
The
army uses him in this way partly because he's small enough not to be
noticed,
but mostly because he refuses to be sidelined. He began fighting with
Soviet
partisans after his family was killed by German soldiers. He was sent
to
boarding school, but he ran away. He mentions being at the German death
camp at
Trostyanets, and presumably he ran away from there, too. The Soviet
officers
talk half-heartedly of sending him to a military school, but they must
assume
he would flee as quickly from that cage as any other. Little Ivan is
damaged
but committed; war has replaced what he once was with something new and
fiery.

The film is not tethered to Ivan's point of
view. There is an unforgettable mid-film digression involving one of
the
military officers, Leonid Kholin, and a nurse, Masha, that unfolds in a
wintry
birch grove. The scene is established with an elaborate shot, lasting
more than
two minutes, in which the two actors and the camera weave through the
tree
trunks together. At one point, Kholin looms suddenly on the right-hand
side of
the frame, almost as if teleported there by a Méliès trick
edit.
Masha escapes out of the picture to the left, and the camera tracks
alongside
Kholin, who takes six steps before Masha appears again, this time in
the
background, walking directly forward. The mood of this
highly
choreographed dance for characters and camera is mildly predatory, the
older
officer stalking the younger one through the woods and trying out dry
pick-up
lines: "Have you ever...known a guy named Lennie?" Masha says she
lives near Moscow and once saw the writer Aleksei Tolstoy on a stroll.
He
comments on the vastness of Siberia. She confesses to a fear of
spiders. He
tells her to relax; she can't. She keeps moving, fending off his
advances
by passing among tree trunks that become vertical barriers in
screen
space as the camera tracks and pivots. The scene is
quiet but
for the sound of a woodpecker rapping in the distance.

It's a seduction scene, to be sure. Masha seems
a bit ill at ease, but Kholin's is a game she's willing to play--a
little
flirtation to take one's mind off the horrors that lurk nearby. That
the
spectre of death haunts even the promise of sex is rendered explicit as
Masha prepares
to hop over a trench--presumably cut into the earth to facilitate some
battle
or other--and Kholin, straddling the gap, takes her into his arms,
holding her
suspended in the air as he plants a kiss on her. What happens next is
unexpected, even by Tarkovsky's standards. The camera drops gently into
the
trench, creating an astonishing composition of lovers framed among the
raw
earth, the sky, and the trees, in a moment punctuated by the sound of
gunfire.
The view is from the grave itself, and the effect is breathtaking.

As war movies go, Ivan's Childhood is
not
so much about the fighting as it is about the waiting, about the
spaces
between battles and the tension that builds up there. The closest the
movie
gets to depicting an actual combat operation is when two Soviet
soldiers
traversing the river come under fire as they try to recover the corpses
of two
countrymen strung up by the Germans in plain view. Mostly, the film is
about
emotions--the feelings of loss, regret, anxiety, pride, and fear that
stack up
near the front lines of any outsized national conflict. There's a
nationalistic
streak to Ivan's
Childhood, as it seeks to spotlight not just the
horror of the
Eastern
Front--known by the Russians as the Great Patriotic War--but also the
enormous
sacrifices that were made by the Soviets as they turned the tide of
history.
Young Ivan is the mouthpiece for much of this and, as embodied by
headstrong young actor Kolya Burlyaev, he's a highly effective
spokesman. Told
by Lieutenant Galtsev (Yevgeny Zharikov) that war is none of his
business, Ivan
responds by asking if the officer has seen the Trostyanets death camp,
on the
outskirts of Minsk. "You know who rests during wartime?" he asks
rhetorically, then declares, "Useless people." Tarkovsky paints the
cherubic Ivan as an angel of vengeance, highlighting the words carved
by Soviet
prisoners onto one wall of the room where the officers wait for battle:
"There are eight of us, none over 19. In one hour, we're to be taken
out
and shot. Avenge us."

Tarkovsky's decision to use World War II
newsreel footage in the picture's coda is jarring, if not outside the
bounds
of his project. These moments show that it's fuelled in large
part by
anger and a great sadness. The Russian government estimated Soviet
military and
civilian casualties in World War II at a staggering 26.6 million--more
than 13
percent of the total population of the USSR at the time. The film,
completed
less than 20 years after the war's end, never makes explicit reference
to those
numbers, but still it plays like a funerary service, especially in the closing section, which takes place after the German surrender. This denouement
is a
signal of the terrible toll of war, and the disturbing real-world
imagery it
incorporates is enduring testament to the atrocities suffered. As a
saving
grace, the whole piece comes around full circle, concluding with a
dream that unfolds on a sun-kissed shore where a boy and a girl chase
each
other
through the sand. More than a dream of innocence lost, it's the dream
of a dead
child. But Ivan's Childhood is more than an elegy
for the dead--it is, finally, a survivor's complex and poetic howl
of grief over what the
living
have lost.

THE BLU-RAY DISCIvan's Childhood is only the third Tarkovsky film
to arrive on Blu-ray
in North America, following Criterion's excellent version of Solaris
and
a pretty good release of The Sacrifice from Kino,
both in 2011. The
transfer is up to Criterion's usual standards, exhibiting a broad
dynamic
range with tons of shadow detail and plenty of delineation in the
midrange.
It's hard to imagine where whites might clip in Ivan's Childhood,
since the
sky is
rarely lighter than a dim grey even in the daylight exteriors, though I
did notice
what could be some blooming highlights in the background of shots where
the sun
is reflected on the water near the end of the film--but that's a picked
nit. In
one or two shots, there may be the hint of digital edge-enhancement, or
perhaps
lens artifacts from the original shoot, but this is a finely detailed,
film-like presentation that holds up extremely well in a home-theatre
setting.
The
liner notes indicate that the movie was scanned from a fine-grain positive
(possibly
at 4K--the notes aren't explicit about that) and cleaned up
using the
usual regimen of tools. It's not absolutely perfect--bits of
dust are occasionally visible, and a scene or two exhibits minor print
damage--but it's about 99 percent of the way there, and it's especially
nice
considering the film's age. The monaural uncompressed PCM audio was
remastered
from a 35mm optical soundtrack, and though it has the noise floor you'd
expect, Criterion has kept it well in check with, again, the finest
digital
clean-up tools. I didn't note any rough spots, and it
sounds as
good as you could expect a 1962 Soviet production to sound. Unless
Criterion
worked
miracles, the source elements have been pretty well-treated.

Special features are just OK, especially by Criterion
standards, and every last one of them is ported over from the company's
2007
DVD. Vida T. Johnson and Graham Petrie contributed a solid audio
commentary to
Criterion's Solaris, and Ivan's
Childhood taps Johnson again, but
only for a 30-minute talking-head (upres'd to a soft 1080p from
its SD
origins). She opens with a discussion of the so-called "Khrushchev
thaw" that followed the death of Stalin in 1953--a period in which
Tarkovsky
was positioned to take good advantage of the country's move to more
artist-friendly policies--then recounts the circumstances that
led to Tarkovsky getting this directing job (he took over another director's failed,
more
conventional attempt). She also takes a stab at describing Tarkovksy's
self-consciously poetic style and his reaction against rote symbolism,
noting
his deliberately elliptical narrative leanings.

In a four-minute piece, DP Vadim Yusov talks (in
Russian, subtitled) about working on the film with Tarkovsky,
specifically
addressing how location and environments suggested specific ways
to tell
the story. He says, for instance, that the flooded forest that
characters in
the film sneak through represents the destruction wrought by war. It's
a
curious fragment of a clip--a filmmaker Q&A that consists of
only one
question and one answer. Shorter still (less than three minutes, if you
don't
count the included clip from Ivan's
Childhood) is a standard-def interview clip with Burlyaev,
who
observes (in Russian, subtitled), "In every frame of what I do, I see
Andrei Tarkovsky." He relates a single anecdote--about how Tarkovsky
prepared him for a scene in which he'd have to cry--and that's all,
folks.

With on-disc extras like these, the booklet
essays take on unexpected weight. Film studies professor Dina Iordanova
contributes a piece that puts the picture in historical perspective,
identifying
its ancestors (The Cranes Are Flying, Ballad
of a Soldier, Father
of a Soldier, among others) and descendents (Loves
of a Blonde, Underground,
Dead Man) before looking at its dream
sequences in some detail.
Criterion has republished a tiny poem in four stanzas, "Ivan's
Willow," written by Tarkovsky's father Arseny, that seems to prefigure
some of the imagery used in the film. But the most illuminating
supplement,
by far, is the second-billed essay by Tarkovksy himself, dating to
1962. The
piece talks candidly about Ivan's Childhood, then
expands in scope to
begin sketching out theories he would eventually explicate in
detail in
his book Sculpting
in Time. He even makes what
amounts to prescient
reference to Ivan's Childhood as his most
accessible work, expressing
regret that he didn't jettison more scenes depicting "the direct
passage
of the plot" and replace them with "slow, nervous tension." Now,
that's my Tarkovsky!